


Things Lost in the War

by everythingmurky



Series: War Never Trades in Such Certainties [1]
Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 16:03:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10364271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everythingmurky/pseuds/everythingmurky
Summary: Shell shocked after WWI, Alec Hardy comes to Broadchurch to resolve lingering doubts from the trenches.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So... this is... I don't even know. Well, I do. It's in part because I really wanted to do an AU for Hardy/Miller that changed things significantly and was also not related to Doctor Who. I wanted a case fic but more than that.
> 
> I also have to credit where credit is due... a large part of the idea came from remembering time spent reading Charles Todd's Ian Rutledge novels. Rutledge is a DI post war who suffers from shell shock and hallucinates the voice of a Scot he executed. So throw that in, other historical ideas I've had in the past, and a rewatching of A Very Long Engagement, and here we are.
> 
> I think this could end where it is. I'm kind of... iffy there. Joe is... a bit worse this go round.

* * *

He knew the moment he saw the boy that the allegations he'd been unable to prove were true.

Half dead, feeling like the air here would finish what the gas started back at Ypres, Hardy had struggled to keep himself upright when facing the widow, regretting his decision to come. He'd wanted to end the questions that haunted him at night, but he'd made a mistake, that was clear with a single look. A cringe, actually, that could have meant a hundred other things, but Hardy's mind insisted on connecting it to what he'd heard and seen in the trenches.

“My god, what is wrong with you?” Mrs. Miller demanded, pulling him inside just as the coughing started, past her spooked son and into the front room.

Hardy didn't answer, half because he couldn't, mostly because he wouldn't. He didn't discuss his health with anyone, though his daughter gave him wide eyed frightened looks, terrified every time he coughed, afraid he'd be carried off by the same flu that stole away her mother not long before he was finally discharged.

“Sit there. I'm getting you some tea. I mean it, do not move from that spot, or I swear I will—” she stopped herself, hurrying out of the room. He didn't have a chance to argue with her, not that he could do much with his lungs on fire again.

He laid back against the chair, closing his eyes and trying to calm his breathing. He was glad he'd left Daisy at the hotel, even if she wasn't much older than the boy who'd shied from him at the door.

She came back in the room with a smaller boy on her arm and a cup in her hands. Hardy frowned at her, taking the cup.

“I think you've got the wrong house, you know.”

Hardy paused, lowering the cup from the his lips. “What?”

She nodded to the uniform he'd worn mostly out of habit and partially because some idiot had packed away his things with Tess' when she died. “Last time I had men in uniform at my door, it was to tell me Joe was dead. He can't die twice, so you've got the wrong house.”

He shook his head. “No, I don't, Mrs. Miller.”

She set her son on the ground and almost fell into a chair. “Did they get it wrong, then? Is Joe alive?”

“No.” Hardy sipped from the tea, needing something to counter the way his throat was closing up on him again. “Alec Hardy. MFP.”

“Yeah, I could see that from the uniform.”

He shrugged, not sure a compliment about her observation was a good idea under the circumstances. “I investigated your husband's death.”

She frowned. “I don't understand. Joe died in battle, didn't he? Oh, you had better not be here to tell me he was a deserter. I won't hear it, do you understand me? You will not say that about Joe. I don't care if he was Welsh or not.”

Hardy didn't care where the man came from. He cared about the allegation a dying soldier had made in his defense when accused of Joe Miller's murder. If Hardy had left it alone, if he'd just accepted that the whole mess was friendly fire—but no, his instincts from his years as a policeman wouldn't quit, and he'd pushed. That private had managed to get himself shot, thinking it would reclaim his honor, confessing on his deathbed to the truth, one Hardy still cursed himself for hearing.

He'd been a child, shouldn't even have been old enough to fight, didn't deserve to die.

Didn't deserve to have ever crossed paths with Joe Miller.

“Your husband wasn't a deserter,” Hardy said. “There was a friendly fire incident.”

She leaned back, closing her eyes. “You bastard. You had me thinking—”

“I'm not responsible for your assumptions. I never said anything of the sort.”

She frowned. “That was your job, wasn't it? Making sure troops got back where they were supposed to? Punishing deserters?”

“I'd just made detective inspector before the war started,” he said. Somehow that life felt so far away from him, even if he'd never really stopped being a policeman in the war. “I held onto my rank. Sort of. It's complicated.”

“Why are you here?”

 _To see if that boy's allegations were true and Joe Miller was the monster he'd claimed,_ Hardy thought, but he did not say. “The inquiry... never finished. We were shelled heavily the next day. I never...”

“Were you invalided out?” she asked, and he frowned at her. “Your lungs. You were gassed, weren't you? My sister's husband was. He drank himself to death after he came back.”

Again, Hardy hated her perception. “Bloody hell. You're nosy.”

“Well, excuse me. You're the one who showed up at my door half dead and scaring children.”

“I'll be going, then,” he said, setting down the cup and heading for the door, well aware that he had a daughter to get back to, one who was probably angry with him. He still wanted to ask about Joe, but he could tell the widow didn't know.

Her son was another matter.

* * *

Hardy took Daisy to the beach.

His lungs hated it, but she was smiling for the first time since he came back from the war, so he figured it was worth the pain. She was going along the water, collecting shells. He shuddered and tried not think about how water filled the trenches, how at times it was high enough to drown them if the gas didn't get them first.

“Would you have arrested my dad?”

Hardy stilled, looking over at the boy. Tom, that was the oldest one's name. He'd picked that detail up in down from the innkeeper's wife. She was a gossip and a flirt, even with him.

“Why would you think I would?”

“Mum said you were police.”

“Aye,” Hardy agreed, “but police don't go about arresting everyone they meet. You think your father did something I should have arrested him for?”

The boy's conflict showed on his face. Damn it, that just made it worse. This kid had loved his father. And that bastard had betrayed him.

“I don't know.”

“I think you do,” Hardy said, keeping his voice quiet. Kids were difficult, but he could talk to his daughter before the war. Now it was harder, now she barely spoke at all, and he always said or did something wrong, but before, he'd managed. He used that with the boy, coaxing a response from him.

“He would have been stopped if he hadn't died?” the boy asked, lip trembling.

That Hardy didn't know. He wouldn't be here if not for the war. And the boy's mother still loved her husband, and he doubted she would if she knew what her husband had done to her son.

“Did your mother know?”

The boy's eyes widened in alarm. “No. He said—it wasn't wrong. He said it wasn't, so I shouldn't tell her because it wasn't.”

“It was, but it wasn't your fault,” Hardy told him. “That was your father. Not you.”

“It was just a hug,” the boy whispered. “How was that wrong?”

“Did you feel like it was? Did you think it was right hiding it from your mother? Were you afraid of him doing it to your brother?”

Tom shivered. “Yes.”

“Then it was wrong.”

“I'm glad he's dead.”

* * *

Ellie reached the beach out of breath and in a panic, having left Fred with Lucy after discovering Tom had disappeared instead of going to the Latimer's like he'd said he was. She never minded that, Beth was a friend and the boys were thick as thieves most days. Him lying about it and not being anywhere when she called had terrified her.

Tom had struggled all through the war, off and on, old enough to feel it, unlike Fred, who'd come along after it started. She knew he'd had a rough patch in the middle, and then his father died, but she'd thought he was doing better.

Then that awful man showed up at the house and he'd withdrawn again. If she could get her hands on that man, she'd hurt him. Wring his neck with her bare hands if she had to, and she could probably manage it because he looked like death. He probably had that, consumption, thin as he was.

She didn't understand what she was seeing when Tom hugged the officer and then ran off to join a girl by the water. She was maybe a year or two older than him and not local. Ellie'd never seen her before, and none of this made sense.

She marched herself over to where Hardy sat on the beach. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

He looked up at her. “Excuse me?”

“No, I want to know. You come to my house, disrupt our lives, upset my son, and then he's hugging you and—is that your daughter?”

“Aye,” the Scot answered. “And no one said I wanted your son to hug me. Seriously, what are you teaching that boy?”

She glared at him. “That's not—what are you even doing here?”

“Penance.”

“That... makes no sense,” Ellie muttered, deciding to hell with it and sitting down next to him. He watched her with a frown. “Oh, please. Like you didn't think I was common before.”

“Never said that, either. Quit assuming things, Miller. Stick to facts.”

She stared at him. “I don't even know what the facts are.”

“Then maybe you're the lucky one.”


End file.
